thing! “Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”
Lee must have heard something in his voice, because Hardin saw him start to tremble
by the light of the silvery moon. But he didn’t say anything, which was probably wise
under the circumstances. And the man standing over him, who had never been in a
fight in his whole life before this, not in high school, not even in grammar school, understood that this was really all over. If Lee had had a gun, he might have tried to
shoot him in the back as he walked away. But otherwise, no. Lee was…what was the
word?
Buffaloed.
Old Lee-Lee was buffaloed.
Hardin was struck by an inspiration. “I got your license number,” he said. “And I
know your name. Yours and hers. I’ll be watching the papers, asshole.”
Nothing from Lee. He just lay on his stomach with his broken glasses twinkling in the
moonlight.
“Goodnight, asshole,” Hardin said. He walked down to the parking lot and drove
away. Shane in a Jaguar.
He was okay for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Long enough to try the radio and then
decide on the Lucinda Williams disc in the CD player instead. Then, all at once, his
stomach was in his throat, still full of the chicken and potatoes he had eaten at the Pot o’ Gold.
He pulled over into the breakdown lane, threw the Jag’s transmission into park,
started to get out, and realized there wasn’t time for that. So he just leaned out instead with the seat belt still fastened and vomited onto the pavement beside the driver’s-side
door. He was shaking all over. His teeth were chattering.
Headlights appeared and swept toward him. They slowed down. Dykstra’s first
thought was that it was a state cop, finally a state cop. They always showed up when
you didn’t need them, didn’t want them. His second one—a cold certainty—was that
it was the PT Cruiser, Ellen at the wheel, Lee-Lee in the passenger seat, now with a
tire iron of his own in his lap.
But it was just an old Dodge full of kids. One of them—a moronic-looking boy with
what was probably red hair—poked his bepimpled moon of a face out the window and
shouted, “Throw it to your heeeels! ” This was followed by laughter, and the car
accelerated away.
Dykstra closed the driver’s-side door, put his head back, closed his eyes, and waited
for the shakes to abate. After a while they did, and his stomach settled along the way.
He realized he needed to pee again and took it as a good sign.
He thought of wanting to kick Lee-Lee in the ear—how hard? what sound?—and tried
to force his mind away from it. Thinking about wanting to do that made him feel sick
all over again.
Where his mind (his mostly obedient mind) went was to that missile-silo commander
stationed out in Lonesome Crow, North Dakota (or maybe it was Dead Wolf,
Montana). The one who was going quietly crazy. Seeing terrorists under every bush.
Piling up badly written pamphlets in his locker, spending many a late night in front of
the computer screen, exploring the paranoid back alleys of the Internet.
And maybe the Dog’s on his way to California to do a job… driving instead of flying because he’s got a couple of special guns in the trunk of his Plymouth Road
Runner… and he has car trouble…
Sure. Sure, that was good. Or it could be, with a little more thought. Had he thought
there was no place for the Dog out in the big empty of the American heartland? That
was narrow thinking, wasn’t it? Because under the right circumstances, anyone could
end up anywhere, doing anything.
The shakes were gone. Dykstra put the Jag back in gear and got rolling. At Lake City
he found an all-night gas station and convenience store, and there he stopped to empty
his bladder and fill his gas tank (after checking the lot and the four pump islands for
the PT Cruiser and not seeing it). Then he drove the rest of the way home, thinking
his Rick Hardin thoughts, and let himself into his John Dykstra house by the canal. He